Thread by @sjmmcd

I wrote an analysis on nuclear energy for @BostonReview. The conversation on nuclear should consider what sorts of energy will be best suited to an increasingly unstable Anthropocene & how our energy choices lock in what sorts of societies we can build bostonreview.net/science-nature…

@BostonReview Nuclear has a few big upsides: no GHG emissions at the point of electricity production, mostly stable supply, & relatively easy to slot into existing grids. This is important given that demand for coal, gas, & oil are still increasing: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

It also has well-known downsides: it's expensive, between $112-189/MWh & costs more to run than it earns, according to @AmoryLovins. Slow to build at 10yr avg build time. Highly toxic waste from mining & operations. Nonrenewable fuel. And tech solutions are mostly still far away

And the upsides come with some caveats. It's not non-carbon & maybe not even low-carbon: nuclear power exceeds the limit of CO2 emissions set by the UK government’s climate change advisor, at 50g of C02 per unit of electricity: theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/fa…

There’s no guarantee new nuclear would displace existing carbon electricity (just as renewables have failed to displace existing carbon): it currently only mitigates 2-3% of carbon emissions and this study predicts that is likely to decrease: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Slotting into grids isn’t all good. It may mean faster transition to non-carbon, but existing grids tend to not be very climate resilient & could lock in undesirable social and political relations, both of which are negative in an increasingly unstable future

Nuclear was developed in a stable period. But even in that time, it has succumbed to failures of safe waste storage & safe operations. As the world becomes less stable with climate change, there’s good reason to believe nuclear would also become more dangerous

Of course, the caveat to that is that even with all the combined deaths caused by nuclear tech—even nuclear weapons—business-as-usual fossil fuel pollution has killed orders of magnitude more people, today more than 8m people per year: ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/…

Even so, the US gov only guarantees 90 years of safe storage for nuclear waste that can remain toxic for 250k years, eg almost as long as humans have existed. The notion that safe storage could be maintained for that amount of time is probably impossible

Finally, some on the left have suggested that nuclear should be central to a Green New Deal for its good union jobs. But currently, the industry is only unionized at the national average & even at full capacity would probably not produce more than 225k jobs

Meanwhile, mining uranium and building plants depends on a lot of non-unionized, precarious, and dangerous labor that historically has burdened already-marginalized workers

Traci Brynne Voyles notes that “Radiation-related diseases are now endemic to many parts of the Navajo Nation,” & among miners “increased incidents of tuberculosis, fibrosis, silicosis, and birth defects, all linked to exposure to uranium from mines and mills.”

Ultimately, the question on whether to forge ahead with nuclear is a tough call & it's worth weighing up the risks and benefits, both of which may have serious consequences, positive & negative. We should be wary of any commentators who are overly strident in their positions